Commentary on Fable ou histoire

by Geoffrey Barto ofgbarto.com

The third book of Les Châtiments carries the title La
famille est restaurée (The family is restored). The title
refers to the Restoration (of the monarchy in 1815) and implies
that Louis-Napoleon had no more right to rule France than Louis
XVIII - their power stemmed from a mixture of nostalgia and
geneaology, not merit.

Throughout much of Les Châtiments Hugo's tone is
bitter. But in the third poem of La famille est restaurée,
rage gives way to mirth as Hugo reminds himself that the
Restoration didn't last, and neither will Empire, for the
illegitimacy of Napoleon III that is so plain to him will be
revealed. The poem, Fable ou histoire, tells of a monkey in a
tiger's suit - Louis-Napoleon clothed in the glory of his uncle,
the mighty Napoleon Bonaparte. The monkey's royal appetite
plainly represents the dynastic pretensions of Napoleon III. But
those dynastic pretensions fall short: Napoleon III is no more
Bonaparte than a monkey is a tiger. Consequently, the ferocity
inherent in the awesome natural power of a tiger is
atrocity when melded to the cunning of a monkey. The monkey knows
this, of course, hence his boastings - that he is king of the
night, that he is to be admired as a tiger, et cetera. Real
tigers don't need to boast about being tigers. Finally, of
course, he is exposed, though not until 18 years after Hugo
composed this poem.

The assumptions of the poem raise one troubling question that
in fact comes up throughout Les Châtiments. Lining up
the symbols, it seems quite plain that the tiger is Napoleon
Bonaparte? Why not Republican France? The short answer is that
the people of France had confirmed Napoleon III as Emperor, so
how could they be trusted to pick a government? Unfortunately,
it's perhaps more complicated than that. Hugo's journals from the
1830s reveal both an undue fondness for Napoleon and a fear that
the people of France weren't ready for self-government. In Hugo's
ideal world - a world he tried to legislate - everyone would be
educated and the key to the wisest government would be to form a
republic where the wisdom of millions of intelligent and educated
citizens could be combined. However, that world had not yet come
- not in 1848, when Hugo pushed for a regency in place of the
emerging Republic, and certainly not when the people turned
around and made Louis-Napoleon their Emperor. Absent that
universally educated populace, was Hugo chastising
Napoleon III for subverting a democracy that would not be the
best government anyway? Unfortunately, it seems that Napoleon
III's greatest crime was failing to be Napoleon I.